Tag Archives: Careers

Great Teams Are About Personalities, Not Just Skills

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by Dave Winsborough and Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

At the start of 2016 Google announced that it had discovered the secret ingredients for the perfect team. After years of analyzing interviews and data from more than 100 teams, it found that the drivers of effective team performance are the group’s average level of emotional intelligence and a high degree of communication between members. Google’s recipe of being nice and joining in makes perfect sense (and is hardly counter intuitive).

Perhaps more surprising, Google’s research implies that the kinds of people in the team are not so relevant. While that may be true at Google, a company where people are preselected on the basis of their personality (or “Googliness”), this finding is inconsistent with the wider scientific evidence, which indicates quite clearly that individuals’ personalities play a significant role in determining team performance. In particular, personality affects:

  • What role you have within the team
  • How you interact with the rest of the team
  • Whether your values (core beliefs) align with the team’s

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Exactly What To Say When An Interviewer Asks How You Would Change Their Company

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by Molly Petrilla

Hiring managers know their companies aren’t perfect, so saying that you can’t think of a single thing to change is never a good response.

What would you change if you worked here?”

Uh oh. You may have just teetered across the “tell me about your biggest weakness” tightrope, and now there’s another challenging question on the table. It’s important to sound inventive but realistic, yet avoid trashing a potential employer or coming off as a know-it-all.

But be ready for it, because the change question has become increasingly popular. “I love this question and ask it in every interview,” says Alina Tubman, a career consultant and campus strategist who has conducted hundreds of on-campus recruiting interviews. Continue reading →

This 60-Year-Old Theory Can Help You Nail Your Next Job Interview

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by Liz Alexander

You need to showcase the higher-order thinking skills computers haven’t mastered and your peers aren’t highlighting.

Day by day, year by year, machines are taking over basic tasks like data collection and processing, leaving the higher-order stuff to humans. The more automation eats away at the edges of our jobs, the more we’ll need to show we’re still masters of the type of thinking skills robots can’t yet do.

That trend is pushing a framework developed more than six decades ago back into the fore. In 1956, the education theorist Benjamin Bloom and his colleagues developed what’s since become known as Bloom’s Taxonomy, a hierarchy of six types of cognitive goals they believed education should address. In 2017, it’s looking more relevant than ever.

Image: Fractus Learning

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Great leadership teams say these six things about each other

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By Evan RothEvan-Roth

Silos, egos, chest beating, throwing under the bus, misalignment and blaming each other. These descriptors top the list when I am asked to work with dysfunctional leadership teams.

It’s far more rare to hear the following six statements in the business world, but these are what winning sports teams say about one another. We can learn a lot from the world of sports as to how we can and should function as winning leadership team members.

It’s not about me, but the team.

It’s fascinating to hear this statement come out of a star player’s mouth. Are they being humble, not trying to draw attention to themselves? Or do they really believe what they are saying?

When our focus and intention is around winning as a team, we actually have a better chance of doing so. When the team is my focus, I cross the silo, embrace what’s best for the organization (vs. my own P&L), and am not satisfied until we all win. My performance is always less than the team’s performance, and I am not satisfied until the collective team wins. The last thing we would ever do is let down our team members. Continue reading →

Research: How a New CEO Can Make a Firm More Entrepreneurial

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by Bastian Grühn, Steffen Strese, Malte Brettel

iStock_000015634604Medium - CopyA new face at the top brings new hopes, and often, new strategic priorities. When Target hired Brian Cornell as CEO in 2014, expectations were high that he would inject fresh energy into one of the largest U.S. retail chains. When that same year Microsoft replaced CEO Steve Ballmer with Satya Nadella, the move signaled the possibility for major change. Indeed, the company eventually announced its strategy to venture massively into cloud computing.

Each year, about 10% of the companies on the S&P 500 Index experience a CEO transition. And this transition is much more than a new nameplate on the corner office. When new CEOs take charge, they sometimes change or even reverse the entire strategic course of the company – a course that, such as in the case of Microsoft, often aligns with entrepreneurial growth opportunities. Continue reading →